Authorship Attribution Studies Research Articles

Resolving the confusion of the authorship attribution of a Bengali book

The present paper aims to determine whether the Bengali book Londoner Naksa ebong France Bhraman (Wondrous Capers at London and Travelling in France) was written by the geologist Pramathanath Bose (P.N. Bose). To find it out, two well-established style markers often used in authorship attribution studies; namely, function words and punctuation marks, are used here. The result shows that possibly this book was penned by the geologist P.N. Bose. As a corollary, it may also be added that this approach may be used in future authorship attribution studies involving Bengali writings.

AppAuth: Authorship Attribution for Android App Clones

Android app clone detection has been extensively studied in our community, and a number of effective approaches and frameworks were proposed and released. However, there still remains one open challenge that has not been well addressed in previous work, i.e., the authorship attribution for the detected app clones. Although state-of-the-art approaches could accurately identify repackaged apps in one way or another, no convincing method has been proposed to identify the original app and the authentic author from the repackaged app pairs, which greatly limits the usage scenario of app clone detection techniques. For example, app market maintainers have to manually confirm the identified repackaged app pairs, while in most cases, it is challenging for them to make an accurate decision. In this paper, we propose AppAuth, a novel learning-based approach to predict the authorship of app clones. To be specific, for a given Android app clone pair (or a group of repackaged apps identified), AppAuth could accurately infer the original author of the plagiarized apps. Our approach is motivated by the traditional authorship attribution studies on binary files. AppAuth first extracts a number of coding-style-related features from the executable .apk files, and then relies on machine learning techniques to train a classification model. We have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of AppAuth. The experiment results suggest that we are able to infer the authorship for Android app clones with high precision. Our work is the first one that tackles the problem systematically and we believe our efforts could positively contribute to the research community and boost the research of app repacking detection and authorship attribution studies.

Augean Stables; Or, the State of Modern Authorship Attribution Studies

Augean Stables; Or, the State of Modern Authorship Attribution Studies

The translator’s visibility: Detecting translatorial fingerprints in contemporaneous parallel translations

We detail the results of experiments towards a fine-grained stylometric analysis, the identification of distinguishing features between contemporaneous literary translations, both parallel works and also translations of non-parallel sets of works by the same author. We examine translations of plays by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen with the initial point of focus being the Ibsen drama Ghosts, for which there exists comparable contemporaneous translations by R. Farqhuarson Sharp and William Archer. Consequently, a number of prose translations of Russian author Anton Chekhov by Marian Fell and Constance Garnett are examined in order to validate hypotheses formed from the results of the Ibsen study and investigate possible particularities in translator’s style which may vary according to genre.By carrying out an analysis of these texts using a variety of machine learning approaches such as Support Vector Machines, Simple Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes and Decision Tree classifiers, a number of distinguishing textual features are obtained, and the relative frequency of these features in the texts are compared to their frequencies in reference corpora in order to establish which features can be attributed to stylistic choices by the translators themselves and which features may be due to influence from the source language or the topic or genre of a text. We also use the popular Delta metric from authorship attribution studies to investigate the clustering of texts based on most frequent words and a list of discriminatory terms learned in the supervised machine learning experiments.We find that common word unigrams and bigrams are the most salient features for translator fingerprinting across our two authors and four translators examined and are ultimately successful in our goal of classifying which text originated from a particular translator with accuracy measurements of over 90% on average.

A paternidade de Madalena: um estudo de caso de atribuição de autoria

Este é estudo de caso de atribuição de autoria, cujo objeto é o conto Madalena publicado no periódico A marmota, no Rio de Janeiro, em 1859. A causa da controvérsia sobre a autoria começou pelo fato de Machado de Assis e Manuel Duarte Moreira de Azevedo, ambos colaboradores do jornal à época, utilizarem a mesma assinatura, M. de A. em seus textos. Nosso estudo é baseado na estatística textual e utiliza o programa Hyperbase. Adotamos uma metodologia que combina técnicas e cálculos a fim de abranger o maior número de variáveis focadas nas características estruturais do corpus. Após o estudo comparativo de 37 gráficos e análises em árvore, relativos a um corpus formado por cinco bases de dados, com contos e romances, constatamos que a maioria deles aponta para Moreira de Azevedo como o provável autor de Madalena.

Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution Studies of William Shakespeare’s Canon: Some Caveats

The paper looks at the problems in conducting non-traditional authorship attribution studies on the canon of William Shakespeare. After a short introduction, the case is put forth that these studies are ‘scientific’ and must adhere to the tenets of the scientific method. By showing that a complete and valid experimental plan is necessary and pointing out the many and varied pitfalls (e.g., the text, the control groups, the treatment of errors), it becomes clear what a valid study of Shakespearean non-traditional authorship attribution demands. I then come to the conclusion that such a valid study is not attainable with the limits of present-day knowledge.

Computational Methods for Coptic: Developing and Using Part-of-Speech Tagging for Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

This article motivates and details the first implementation of a freely available part of speech tag set and tagger for Coptic. Coptic is the last phase of the Egyptian language family and a descendant of the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. Unlike classical Greek and Latin, few resources for digital and computational work have existed for ancient Egyptian language and literature until now. We evaluate our tag set in an inter-annotator agreement experiment and examine some of the difficulties in tagging Coptic data. Using an existing digital lexicon and a small training corpus taken from several genres of literary Sahidic Coptic in the first half of the first millennium, we evaluate the performance of a stochastic tagger applying a fine-grained and coarse-grained set of tags within and outside the domain of literary texts. Our results show that a relatively high accuracy of 94–95% correct automatic tag assignment can be reached for literary texts, with substantially worse performance on documentary papyrus data. We also present some preliminary applications of natural language processing to the study of genre, style, and authorship attribution in Coptic and discuss future directions in applying computational linguistics methods to the analysis of Coptic texts.

Much Ado About Whose Fingerprints? Shakespeare’s Hand in the 1602 Additions to The Spanish Tragedy

The summer of 2013 should surely be marked on the calendar as a hallmark year in the long-running tradition of Shakespeare authorship studies. For in the month of August, Douglas Bruster, a Shakespearean scholar working at the University of Austin (Texas), gained the front headlines of various newspapers across the globe announcing that he had found persuasive evidence of Shakespeare’s ‘fingerprints’ on the 1602 Additions to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. Bruster, however, acknowledges his allegiance to previous scholarly work (he specifically mentions the work of Brian Vickers) pointing ahead towards this same direction. Along this essay, it is my purpose to review various methods of authorship attribution studies and to purvey further evidences pointing to Shakespeare as the most likely candidate for such Additions. As I would like to argue, whereas none of the methods under scrutiny has proven to be infallible per se, if taken together they can contribute to dispel the enigma of the Shakespearean canon.

Automatic Linguistic Pattern Identification Based on Graph Text Representation

In this paper it is presented a model of text representation based on graphs. The model is applied in the particular case study of authorship attribution. The experiments were performed by using a corpus made up of 500 documents written by 10 different authors (50 documents per author). The obtained results highlight the benefit of using text features at different levels of language description in tasks associated to automatic processing of information. In particular, we have obtained a performance of 57% of accuracy for the authorship attribution task.

MULTIPLE AUTHORS DETECTION: A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF DREAM OF THE RED CHAMBER

Inspired by the authorship controversy of Dream of the Red Chamber and the application of machine learning in the study of literary stylometry, we develop a rigorous new method for the mathematical analysis of authorship by testing for a so-called chrono-divide in writing styles. Our method incorporates some of the latest advances in the study of authorship attribution, particularly techniques from support vector machines. By introducing the notion of relative frequency as a feature ranking metric, our method proves to be highly effective and robust. Applying our method to the Cheng–Gao version of Dream of the Red Chamber has led to convincing if not irrefutable evidence that the first 80 chapters and the last 40 chapters of the book were written by two different authors. Furthermore, our analysis has unexpectedly provided strong support to the hypothesis that Chapter 67 was not the work of Cao Xueqin either. We have also tested our method to the other three Great Classical Novels in Chinese. As expected no chrono-divides have been found. This provides further evidence of the robustness of our method.

A Study of Authorship Attribution in English and Tamil Emails

The aim of our study is to identify author of unknown emails of Tamil and English. The recent approaches in Authorship Attribution show that apart from lexical measures some other features of written language are considerably effective as discriminators of author style. However, there have been no attempts to compare the attribution potential of these features. The aim of the present study, then, has to examine the effectiveness of several styles-markers in authorship attribution between the following two languages, English and Tamil equally important, however, we have to compare the usefulness of the chosen style-markers across a two languages the results proved high attribution effectiveness can be achieved in both the language.

Comparative evaluation of term selection functions for authorship attribution

Different computational models have been proposed to automatically determine the most probable author of a disputed text (authorship attribution). These models can be viewed as special approaches in the text categorization domain. In this perspective, in a first step we need to determine the most effective features (words, punctuation symbols, part-of-speech, bigram of words, etc.) to discriminate between different authors. To achieve this, we can consider different independent feature-scoring selection functions (information gain, gain ratio, pointwise mutual information, odds ratio, chi-square, bi-normal separation, GSS, Darmstadt Indexing Approach (DIA), and correlation coefficient). Other term selection strategies have also been suggested in specific authorship attribution studies. To compare these two families of selection procedures, we have extracted articles from two newspapers and belonging to two categories (sports and politics). To enlarge the basis of our evaluations, we have chosen one newspaper written in the English language (‘Glasgow Herald’) and a second one in Italian (‘La Stampa’). The resulting collections contain from 987 to 2,036 articles written by four to ten columnists. Using the Kullback–Leibler divergence, the chi-square measure and the Delta rule as attribution schemes, this study found that some simple selection strategies (based on occurrence frequency or document frequency) may produce similar, and sometimes better, results compared with more complex ones.

Found in translation: To what extent is authorial discriminability preserved by translators?

Most authorship attribution studies have focused on works that are available in the language used by the original author (Holmes, 1994; Juola, 2006) because this provides a direct way of examining an author's linguistic habits. Sometimes, however, questions of authorship arise regarding a work only surviving in translation. One example is 'Constance', the putative 'last play' of Oscar Wilde, only existing in a supposed French translation of a lost English original. The present study aims to take a step towards dealing with cases of this kind by addressing two related questions: (1) to what extent are authorial differences preserved in translation; (2) to what extent does this carry-over depend on the particular translator? With these aims, we analysed 262 letters written by Vincent van Gogh and by his brother Theo, dated between 1888 and 1890, each available in the original French and in an English translation. We also performed a more intensive investigation of a subset of this corpus, comprising forty-eight letters, for which two different English translations were obtainable. Using three different indices of discriminability (classification accuracy, Hedge's g, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve), we found that much of the stylistic discriminability between the two brothers was preserved in the English translations. Subsidiary analyses were used to identify which lexical features were contributing most to inter-author discriminability. Discrimination between translation sources was possible, although less effective than between authors. We conclude that 'handprints' of both author and translator can be found in translated texts, using appropriate techniques.

Comparative study of Authorship Identification Techniques for Cyber Forensics Analysis

Authorship Identification techniques are used to identify the most appropriate author from group of potential suspects of online messages and find evidences to support the conclusion. Cybercriminals make misuse of online communication for sending blackmail or a spam email and then attempt to hide their true identities to void detection.Authorship Identification of online messages is the contemporary research issue for identity tracing in cyber forensics. This is highly interdisciplinary area as it takes advantage of machine learning, information retrieval, and natural language processing. In this paper, a study of recent techniques and automated approaches to attributing authorship of online messages is presented. The focus of this review study is to summarize all existing authorship identification techniques used in literature to identify authors of online messages. Also it discusses evaluation criteria and parameters for authorship attribution studies and list open questions that will attract future work in this area.

The Authorship of the Disputed Federalist Papers with an Annotated Corpus

The present paper discusses the potentials of annotated corpora in authorship attribution studies. These corpora allow the retrieval of morpho-syntactic information, which may serve as stylistic features, getting beyond the most common word-based approaches. In itself, annotation is meant to contain the structural mark-up, the lemmatization, the part-of-speech mark-up, and the textual reference. For the purpose, the corpus of the Federalist Papers is tested to explore Burrows's Delta from a twofold perspective, lemma-based Delta and POS-based Delta. The experiments come to demonstrate the validity of these approaches for authorial attribution with the finding of empirical evidence to assign, in the majority of cases, the hand responsible for the disputed Federalist Papers, but for paper 55, traditionally considered less Madisonian in the relevant literature.

The State of Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution Studies—2012: Some Problems and Solutions

In 1998, an article appeared in Computers and the Humanities with the following abstract: The statement, “Results of most non traditional authorship attribution studies are not accepted as definitive,” is explicated. A variety of problems in these studies are listed and discussed: studies governed by expediency; a lack of competent research; flawed statistical techniques; corrupted primary data; lack of expertise in allied fields; a dilettantish approach; inadequate treatment of errors. Various solutions are suggested: construct a correct and complete experimental design; educate the practitioners; study style in its totality; identify and educate the gatekeepers; develop a complete theoretical framework; form an association of practitioners.1 1Rudman, “State of Authorship Studies,” 351. Fourteen years later we can see a muddled but gradual advancement in some areas.2However, all of the old problems not only remain but many have been exacerbated. A slew of new, unproven methodologies, new problems, and new controversies have the field in turmoil. This paper uses that earlier publication as a starting point to assess the present state of non-traditional authorship attribution studies—its successes, failures, problems, and prospects. 2Khosmood and Levinson.

Identifying Shakespeare's Additions to The Spanish Tragedy (1602): A New(er) Approach

In 1602 the fourth quarto edition of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy appeared, the title page describing it as “Newly corrected, amended, and enlarged with new additions of the Painters part, and others, as it hath of late been divers times acted”. The authorship of these five Additions, totalling 320 lines, has been much discussed, the leading candidates being Shakespeare and Jonson. This essay uses a new method in authorship attribution studies, drawing on insights from Corpus Linguistics. The advent in the 1960s of large electronic corpora of actual language use, and the ability to create concordances, revealed that human beings communicate not just by deploying single words but also by grouping words into sequences, collocations of several words. Some of these are shared by language communities (“by the way”, “the bottom line”), others are unique to individuals. New software programs, devised to detect student plagiarism, can scan two texts in parallel and reveal every collocation of three consecutive words (“trigrams”) common to both. When applied to anonymous or co-authored plays, this method automatically identifies collocations that occur in the target text and in works of known authorship. By checking each result against a corpus of contemporary texts it becomes possible to make authorship attributions of quite short samples with greater precision than ever before. A word-by-word comparison between the 1602 Additions to The Spanish Tragedy and over 400 plays and masques from the period 1580 to 1642 revealed more than 100 unique collocation matches with Shakespeare's plays and poems, enabling a definite attribution.

Shakespeare and Authorship Studies in the Twenty-First Century

Authorship attribution studies have traditionally been based on a wide reading knowledge of a text in its historical and generic contexts. With the advent of computers, it became possible to process large quantities of data quickly. However, the first computer-driven attribution methods could only deal with individual words, ignoring grammar, syntax, and all the individualizing features of authorial language. By counting word frequencies and subjecting the word-count information to statistical analysis, it was hoped that authorship problems could be solved. Time has shown that the most this method can achieve is a measure of likeness, not identity. Second-generation research in authorship attribution has opened up a new path, drawing on recent advances in linguistics. Neurolinguists have shown that human utterances often take the form of chunks or ready-made groups of words. In parallel, linguists studying large corpora of actual language use have found that certain word groups tend to recur in close proximity. These collocations are partly phrases or idioms in general circulation, partly idiosyncratic formations which an individual speaker or writer uses regularly. By using modern plagiarism software we can establish the distinctive phraseognomy of one or more authors within a restricted database, organized by genre and date. Collocation matching, an automated and replicable process, can provide a reliable authorship indicator when dealing with anonymous or coauthored texts. On the evidence given here, it seems certain that the Additions to the 1602 text of Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy were written by Shakespeare.

Introduction

It is always difficult to represent the range and quality of a conference such as Digital Humanities 2009 in a single volume. Indeed, it was a great pleasure for us as programme chair and local organiser to see so many outstanding submissions become fascinating conference presentations. As a result, we felt compelled to depart from tradition and produce two different special issues of LLC to do justice to the large number of high-quality papers at the conference. This is entirely unprecedented, but also warranted, given the strength of work presented. It also suggests the breadth and depth of outstanding scholarship that is now to be found in our field. This issue presents a collection of papers on a variety of topics, to indicate the breadth of work presented and the other concentrates on authorship attribution studies: an area in which we found a particular depth of high-quality research. There were also very welcome indications of the promise of the future of digital humanities, since several of the presenters of excellent research were early career scholars. It is therefore particularly gratifying to be able to include articles in this issue from Henriette Roued and Dana Wheeles, both of whom are PhD students, as well as contributions from more established scholars.

A survey of modern authorship attribution methods

AbstractAuthorship attribution supported by statistical or computational methods has a long history starting from the 19th century and is marked by the seminal study of Mosteller and Wallace (1964) on the authorship of the disputed “Federalist Papers.” During the last decade, this scientific field has been developed substantially, taking advantage of research advances in areas such as machine learning, information retrieval, and natural language processing. The plethora of available electronic texts (e.g., e‐mail messages, online forum messages, blogs, source code, etc.) indicates a wide variety of applications of this technology, provided it is able to handle short and noisy text from multiple candidate authors. In this article, a survey of recent advances of the automated approaches to attributing authorship is presented, examining their characteristics for both text representation and text classification. The focus of this survey is on computational requirements and settings rather than on linguistic or literary issues. We also discuss evaluation methodologies and criteria for authorship attribution studies and list open questions that will attract future work in this area.